Refuge is prison for hunted Palestinian
MOLLY MOORE
Washington Post, 23 August 2004
Jenin Refugee Camp, West Bank -- Israeli F-16 fighter jets roared lower and lower in the summer sky, and Zakaria Zbeida broke out in nervous tics: He twisted a short, black curl on his forehead round a finger, he jiggled his right knee, he sent a neighborhood boy out for another red and white pack of L&M cigarettes.
"Every minute, I fear death," said the gaunt 28-year-old Zbeida, the Jenin commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the militant wing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, and a man wanted dead or alive by Israel as a terrorist leader.
While Zbeida spends most of his waking hours in hiding, he has not shied away from becoming the self-appointed sheriff and unofficial mayor of this refugee camp of 15,000 people. The role is a shift for a militant accustomed to fighting Israel. Pinned down by Israeli forces, Zbeida has turned to exercising local power by punishing accused criminals, mediating family disputes and serving as chief broker between residents and the sluggish Palestinian bureaucracy, according to the accounts of numerous residents and officials.
"Due to the absence of law," said Zbeida, "we are the law."
Last month, Zbeida and his fighters torched two Palestinian Authority government buildings because officials refused to meet their demands for protecting and finding jobs for al-Aqsa fighters, according to witnesses. A few weeks earlier, one of Zbeida's men reportedly shot an alleged rapist in the leg as punishment. Last year, his men kidnapped and flogged the governor in a public square, accusing him of corruption.
"In Jenin, the Israelis have destroyed all the Palestinian Authority institutions," Zbeida said in one of three lengthy interviews conducted in hideouts in the refugee camp over a three-month period. "The only group that remains is the resistance."
Zbeida is unrepentant not only about attacks on security officials and Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories, but also about those that have killed civilians in Israel. Two weeks ago, he claimed responsibility for a bombing at a busy crossing between the West Bank and Jerusalem that killed a Palestinian and wounded a dozen other Palestinians and six Israeli border patrol officers. The bomb was apparently meant to be smuggled into Israel when it detonated.
Zbeida is described as "extensively involved in terrorist activities" by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, an organization of retired Israeli security officials that conducts research for the Israeli military. Although he has acknowledged authorship of violent actions carried out by his group, Zbeida declined to discuss how he chose targets that killed civilians.
Since the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, against Israel began nearly four years ago, Israeli security forces have honed their intelligence and tactical skills and have decimated the leadership and ranks of Zbeida's guerrilla army with arrests and assassinations.
The barrier Israel has built near the northern area of the West Bank has all but halted the stream of suicide bombers from Jenin. In the first two years of the intifada, before construction of the barrier began, 16 suicide bombers from Jenin carried out 14 attacks against Israelis, nearly one-fifth of the 75 suicide bombings recorded from late 2000 to the end of 2002. No bomber from Jenin has carried out an attack inside Israel since last October, according to the Israeli military.
"The martyrdom operations are still part of the struggle," insisted Zbeida, using the Palestinian term for suicide bombings. He added, however, they are "a tiny part."
More and more, according to Zbeida, the struggle is shifting inward.
On the run
Just after midnight on June 10, a bullet from an Israeli sniper came so close to hitting Zbeida that he felt the rush of air next to his shoulder.
"We didn't know the soldiers were there," Zbeida recounted, blowing a stream of smoke through teeth that have been yellowed by too much tea, coffee and nicotine. "They were undercover. The sniper was on the hill."
Zbeida's skin is the color of roasted pecans. A year and a half ago he was helping build a bomb when it exploded in his face, leaving his high cheeks, nose and forehead permanently blackened. Red veins snake across the whites of his eyes; he suffers from a detached retina and he has difficulty seeing in the harsh glare of the desert's daylight hours.
Last winter, three bullets slammed into Zbeida's shoulder as he fled an Israeli raid on one of his hideouts. In March, undercover Israeli border patrol officers ambushed his car in Jenin. Zbeida was not in the vehicle, but five of his lieutenants were killed.
During an interview this summer, AH-64 Apache helicopters rumbled over the building where he was hiding. He slipped outside and disappeared into the narrow lanes of the camp as children on nearby rooftops shouted the locations of the patrolling choppers.
Zbeida is near the top of Israel's list of most hunted Palestinian militants. His most heinous crime, according to Israeli sources, was organizing the Nov. 28, 2002, election-day attack in which two gunmen opened fire on a polling station. Six Israelis and both gunmen were killed.
The attack came two days after Zbeida took command of the Jenin cell of al-Aqsa from Alaa Sabagh. One of Zbeida's childhood friends, Sabagh was killed in an Israeli missile strike on his hideout.
Since then, Zbeida's cell has carried out no suicide bombings inside Israel, according to Israeli military records. The three suicide attacks launched from Jenin during that period were claimed by Islamic Jihad. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center said Zbeida's fighters had concentrated on the "shooting and planting of explosive devices in the Jenin area," targeting Jewish settlers and Israeli security forces.
Zbeida roams freely throughout the refugee camp, where almost every door is open to him and residents regularly call his cell phone to warn of approaching Israeli troops and aircraft. But he said he seldom ventures outside the warrens of chalky white buildings stacked against a hillside on the western edge of the city of Jenin. The 93-acre camp is his refuge and his prison.
"I carry a gun 24 hours a day," he said in a soft, even voice. He keeps a stainless steel Smith & Wesson pistol tucked inside the belt of his worn jeans. Often he carries a battered M-16 assault rifle.
Zbeida, who has a ninth-grade education, is representative of the generation of boys who came of age in the refugee camps during an earlier Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in 1987. He grew up with five brothers and two sisters and a strong-willed mother. His father died of cancer in 1993. At age 13, Zbeida said, he was shot in the knee by Israeli soldiers during a demonstration in which Palestinians were throwing rocks at them. He spent five of his teenage years in Israeli jails for throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at soldiers.
After he was released in 1994 under agreements reached in the Oslo peace accords, Zbeida, who learned Hebrew in prison, worked as an interpreter for an Israeli Jew who sponsored a community theater group housed on the top floor of his mother's house. He said he also supported himself by stealing cars and working construction jobs in Israel, and later took a job as a policeman for the Palestinian Authority.
When the current Palestinian uprising began, Zbeida quit the police force and joined the Jenin cell of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, then headed by a first cousin. The organization was created by Arafat's Fatah movement to compete with increasingly popular rivals such as Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas.
In the spring of 2002, Israeli forces attacked the Jenin refugee camp in response to suicide bombings in Israel. Zbeida's mother and brother were shot dead by Israeli soldiers. His mother was standing in the window of her home, and his brother had joined gunmen defending the camp, family members said. Two more brothers have been jailed by Israel, they added.
Now, after nearly two years of dodging Israeli aircraft and snipers, Zbeida said, "I've adapted to being a militant."
His family, however, has not.
"I am afraid all the time," said Jameel Zbeida, his uncle, the 48-year-old patriarch of the extended family. "There's not ever a bullet fired that I don't think is directed toward Zakaria."
Zbeida's 21-year-old wife, Alaa, and year-old son, Mohammad, move from house to house and see him sporadically. She is pregnant with the couple's second child, his uncle said.
"Some weeks Zakaria sees his son every day, sometimes a month goes by and he can't see him," the uncle said. "Sometimes the only time his wife can see him is passing in the street."
Still, Zbeida said he had no regrets about his chosen path or about the suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in bars, restaurants and on buses.
"They killed my mother," he said. "She was a civilian. How can they expect their civilians not to be targeted?"
He conceded, however, that he could not be a suicide bomber.
"You become a suicide bomber when you are no longer looking for a remedy," he suggested. "I still have hope there'll be a time when the Palestinian people stop being oppressed.
"When I had a son last year I became more determined to resist," said Zbeida. "I have to grab back his rights for him to live in peace. If the situation remains the same, he's going to have the same kind of life I'm living. I would like him to live in peace and security and freedom in a Palestinian state."
He glanced about nervously as an Israeli drone, a remotely piloted aircraft, whined overhead.
"I do have one regret," Zbeida said. "I'm sorry I couldn't provide a better life for my child."
Crude Politics
When it comes to local politics, Zbeida's precarious daily routine has not deterred him from working alongside Palestinian authorities -- or from confronting them.
Ask Qaddoura Moussa, the new governor of Jenin District. On July 29, four days after Arafat appointed him governor, Moussa sat at his desk and delivered a frank endorsement of Zbeida.
"He is part of this government," Moussa said. "He will never act individually without coordinating with us."
Two days later, Zbeida and about half a dozen gunmen broke into Moussa's office. They removed the photograph of the smiling Arafat from the wall for safe keeping, splashed gasoline over the governor's desk, chairs and floor, then set the office ablaze as a cameraman from al-Jazeera, the Arabic language satellite network, followed them.
The next morning, Moussa described Zbeida's behavior as "barbaric." But he said that rather than pressing charges, he preferred to "negotiate" with him.
Zbeida said the governor had not delivered promised jobs to his fighters, and accused Palestinian security services of tipping the Israelis off about where to find wanted Palestinians.
Last year, Zbeida and his men kidnapped Moussa's predecessor, handcuffed him, then beat him as a crowd watched in a public square. His crime, according to Zbeida: "He stole the people's money." The ex-governor fled for neighboring Jordan, Palestinian officials said.
In recent weeks, Zbeida has joined other al-Aqsa leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in calling on the Palestinian Authority to end corruption. They also urged Arafat to relinquish some of his powers.
"Zakaria is a public hero," said Hisham Haija, 40, an unemployed taxi driver who grew up a few houses from the Zbeida family.
The refugee camp has embraced Zbeida as a native son and as a protector during Israel's harshest incursions. He has parlayed the empathy and respect into the role of crude politician, rough-edged social worker and lawman. His soldiers have become a local police militia, according to Zbeida, his relatives and camp residents.
When young men harassed female students on a local university campus by taking their photographs with cellular telephones -- a serious offense in Palestinian society, which is very protective of women's privacy -- Zbeida sent fighters to confiscate the men's cars and rough them up.
He then recommended that the university hire security guards to prevent future problems.
He intervened at local hospitals where poor patients were being charged full rates: "We asked them to reduce the bills of the poor," said Zbeida. "We investigate thieves."
When a camp resident was accused of raping a young woman last month, Zbeida dispatched someone to administer a bullet in the leg, according to residents.
At a recent soccer match where town officials feared that rivalries between two teams might erupt into violence, Zbeida said he provided al-Aqsa fighters as security.
But even some of Zbeida's supporters said he had overstepped his authority.
"The protection of people is the responsibility of professional security people, not the brigades," said Ahmad Ghunaim, a member of the Fatah movement's most influential governing councils, a proponent of reform in the Palestinian Authority and a political liaison between militant leaders and senior officials. "The role of the brigades is to continue the resistance. The brigades are not supposed to decide who will teach in the university or choose the doctors in the hospital. They feel they have the right to do that. We believe it's not right."
Zbeida scoffed at the criticism. He noted that Israel has only recently permitted the Palestinian Authority police to wear uniforms on the street and still does not allow them to carry weapons.
"They are useless," he said.
Special correspondent Sufian Taha contributed to this report.